5.13.2010

“Pandemic, Profits”

Poetry--even in the flu! Here's to universalhealth care and a system that doesn't makemoney from our being sick.

A third week sick with flu, coughing fits, greensputum, amoxicillin, the specialized vocabulary,of illness, the ailing body of words still readyfor poetry, and to go to work. The dandelions,slope-shouldered lean their burnished headstoward the early sun. Nature never did betraythe heart that loved her. A few feet further onthe flowers are white-haired, gone to seed, onebreath will finish them. Last year our humanbreath spread pandemic around the world, whenpigs gave us their virus, some called them swine, we gloved and masked, thin armor against Natureas she tested us in her favorite game, Evolve ordie, a 3-D global living color beta run-through,while the last tree I passed before my office doorramified toward the sky, lifting up green obelisksout of what, a month before, were nubs of budsI didn’t even notice as I walked by, while friskypharmaceutical prices rose, motel hotel airlineprofits fell, right-wing pundits blamed peoplefrom other countries, and CNN never opinedon links between hog factory-farms in Veracruzand North Carolina, lagoons of manure, vastwastes of rotting pig parts, fumes, flies, birds,the “free flow” of capital across borders, NAFTA,anti-immigrant anti-union laws, the fecal pigstydraining into the aquifer, fever, throats and bodiessore everywhere, the coughing workers, neighbors,the first death doubtless not the first: "Fightingthis disease for months…the pig waste for years," Erasto Bautista of La Gloria. Building up resistance.